I Hear You

Album review

The jetsetting DJ and producer Peggy Gou raises the curtain on her debut album with a meditation on creativity, as if to set her own intentions for the exuberant dance music to come. "Create your own view, your own universe, your own after-image," she says on opening track "Your Art" over a slow-churning, wobbly bassline. "Look around. Look up. Look down. What do you see? What do you feel?"

These are questions Gou likely has asked herself in the decade leading up to I Hear You. Since her rise in the mid '10s, she's built a worldwide following—and her own fashion line—through stellar, genre-jumping sets for DJ Kicks and the Boiler Room, busting barriers at Berghain and releasing a series of spacious underground house and/or techno tracks for Rekids and Ninja Tune. Until now, though, the Seoul-born, London College of Fashion-trained, Berlin-steeped Gou hasn't released the Big Artistic Statement that is the studio album. 

Gou's gratuitously catchy 2023 single "(It Goes Like) Nanana" blew up on social media, the perfect lead-in for her first album. With a liquid, bottom-end bass tone, the get-the-TikTok-started anthem is the centerpiece of I Hear You. Its ravey mid-1990s energy—think Dee-Lite or Soho—drives a smarter-than-it-seems track that references its own lyrical shortcomings in its verses before leaping into its ridiculous placeholder chorus: "Na na na na!/Na na na na!"

I Hear You showcases Gou's deep database of electronic dance music; the album taps tones and rhythms from drum & bass, Chicago house, Berlin techno, Europop and border-jumping global dance music. It draws inspiration from a decade that generated rave-bred dance artists like Technotronic in the early part and extra-heavy house and techno acts from the Prodigy, Daft Punk, and the Chemical Brothers in its second half.  Gou's driving, determined house track "Back to One" channels the thump-clap sound of Chicago's Relief Records and "Romeo"-era Basement Jaxx. "I Believe in Love Again," her high-octane collaboration with Lenny Kravitz, is the best thing he's created since Zoë. "Seoulsi Peggygou (서울시페기구)" is throwback drum & bass featuring a plucked koto melody, a luxurious late-track break and a chrome-toned LTJ Bukem-style sheen.

Throughout I Hear You, in fact, Gou produces as if the past two decades of dance never existed, ignoring contemporary synth-stabbing, jumbo-thump sounds in favor of small-tent 1990s commercial house and groove-is-in-the-heart techno, when Cher's "Believe" and Everything But the Girl's "Missing" jumped from gay clubs to the pop charts.

Wonderfully, the whole project somehow hits with a rush-of-the-new energy. At nearly six minutes, "Lobster Telephone" is the album's longest track and it's worth every measure. Leaping languages like house music leapt borders, the 130 bpm jam features a "Wordy Rappinghood"-like chant that showcases Gou's ability to connect influences until they achieve a kind of couture elegance. Album-closer "1+1=11" is a brilliant 2 a.m. tease-tease-release track driven by an earworm-inducing three-note keyboard melody that, when Gou (no doubt) drops it this summer during a set-defining climax, will tear the proverbial club up. © Randall Roberts/Qobuz